I generally upgrade my PC every five years. This usually means new motherboard, CPU, and RAM, and this last time a case as well. The last time I did it was in 2019, not counting the brief window where I was able to purchase an RTX 3080 at or near MSRP in around 2022. Not only am I overdue for an upgrade, my needs have changed pretty drastically since 2019.
Back then I was all about RGB, and sought to create the quintessential unicorn vomit PC. While I still like the aesthetic, I now know that maintenance of all that RGB can be a hassle. You need to manage more cables, and components on LED strips can fail, ruining the look of the case. The case is made of mostly tempered glass, but It’s now on the floor, obviously not ideal. The PC isn’t the only rig on my desk now (ham radios are also called rigs), and the PC has to share space with three or four of them, all with power, coax, grounding wire, and control cables of their own.
I’m rocking a 14 year old CPU (3570k), 16gb of DDR3 and a gtx1070 (non-ti).
I was so god damn stoked to build a new machine this year, only to watch first ddr5 then ddr4 soar our of my price range…
Now even the used stuff around me is jumping in price, with mobo cpu ram deals getting scooped up only for the ram to pop back up at twice the price the next day.
Fuck AI.
First it was crypto, now it’s AI.
Two stupid fucking things we never wanted.
Fuck every crypto bro and every AI enthusiast.
There’s a lot of overlap in those two groups
The Crypto bros needed something to offload all the gpus they bought and found a word salad maker that relies on them.
It’s pretty much a circle. I got a friend who went all in on crypto is going all in on AI right now.
It’s almost a complete circle.
Right wing lunatics are big in both.
Crypto because the hurrdurr keep gubmint outta my lyfe shit (despite the fact that crypto is infinitely more easy to track than cash…), and AI because they hate liberal reality, so AI lets them generate all the videos they could hope to have to validate their fake victimhoods.
Imagine when the crypto train was full on, somebody said that something other will come along where the crypto train will be small joke in comparison.
Its the necessary pieces for the next steps. They need crypto for programmable money so they can turn you off, digital ID so they can track your every move in the modern world, AI combined with mass surveillance to enforce it all. Someone wants this world, thats for sure.
Even if AI somehow falls off the trend, I feel like we’ll see another stupid way to throw mountains of processing power at something. I can’t wait to see what goofy shit they’ll come up with.
Dodged the crypto gold rush twice by managing to buy my GPUs before they happened. The last hard drive purchase was more than a year ago, a 2TB Seagate to replace a damaged one. The PC I’m on now was built four years ago, and the most pricey upgrade was getting a 5700X3D.
Now I think I’ll have to be more careful while I use my PC, because we’re back to 1995 pricing.
I started putting together a RAID, got the housing and the first drive, the plan was to buy a drive with each paycheck until I had the 4 drives I need. The first drive was like $250, arrived last week. Then I checked the price this week and the same drive is now $650.
I upgraded my 8 year rig right when Trump was elected thinking tariffs would screw me. Did not forsee AI being the bigger factor
Gratz, good decision.
I live on the other side of the pond and did not build a new rig in 2024, because the tariffs were never going to affect me much… Did not foresee the bubble inflating this big though. I originally wanted to build in autumn 2025, now I have no idea when it’ll actually happen.
builds a new PC.
continues to play Half Life 2.
25% plan to buy this year. 40% in the next two years.
RAM prices have quadrupled since this time last year. So if only 25% as many people buy this year than last year, then the line still went up for the RAM companies.
This is a huge windfall for them, and there is absolutely zero reason for them to go back to $75/32GB DDR5 kits.
Shame that nobody is capable of restraint…
there is absolutely zero reason for them to go back to $75/32GB DDR5 kits.
There’s enough memory manufacturers that as long as the cartel was successfully busted when I forget which government took action against them last year, that they should start competing on price again as soon as demand re-normalizes
The vast majority of the market is made by only three companies who all have dramatically raised prices. Sk Hynix, Samsung and Micron.
Micron sailed off into the sunset, flipping the bird at consumers with both hands. Hynix & Samsung are equally quadruple-pricing versus a year ago. All of them are seeing insane, record profits.
Unless a government steps in and does something crazy like declaring RAM a subsidy & setting price controls… this is just the new normal.
Micron only killed their consumer memory division, they’re still making memory for b2b customers, so they can still affect and be affected by market forces when it comes to memory pricing
I feel bad for people working in manufacturing for parts like cases or cooling systems. When nobody builds PCs anymore, nobody buys their products either and they go out of business for good.
This whole AI mess is killing gaming as we know it.
AI is killing people and civilization.
A few companies or departments have already shuttered for this exact reason.
I know is probably not possible, but I wish a competitor manufacturer would rise during this times and when the bubble pops we would let these worms starve.
competitor manufacturer
There’s Chinese ram that’s becoming good. But that doesn’t mean Americans will be allowed to buy it.
But really gamers are the worst about consumerism. Nvidia is the worst and gamers keep going back. Steve from Gamer’s Nexus had a funny chart in one of his videos a year or so ago. It was a flow chart about gamer spending on hardware showing all the advantages of AMD and Intel in gaming with a big arrow at the bottom that was labeled something like “And then you ignore everything and give all your money to Nvidia.”
honestly nvidia doesn’t give a hoot if we stop.
"Consumer (gaming) GPUs make up roughly 7% to 11% of Nvidia’s total revenue, and an even smaller percentage of their net profits. "
the only reason they sell to us still is the extent they can repackage commercial gpus for us.
Nvidia is the worst and gamers keep going back.
It’s still the default, unfortunately, as those gamers are usually swayed by popular opinion (see r/buildapc, fucking awful FOMO city), and AMD drivers have been hit-or-miss and they’ll usually threaten for a refund and buy another green box.
I run my boxes for so long I end up having to basically build a whole new rig by the time it is obsolete thanks to socket, RAM and GPU changes. Feels like it almost defeats the purpose of rolling your own. I mostly just use my Steam Deck at this point. Tired of keeping up with all that combined with shortages.
This is what I’ve done for 35 years. My current build is almost seven years old. My previous build, now 12 years old, is my current media server, the ones before that are recycled.
Also, by the time I build a new one, I need to research everything all over again, because it’s all changed so much. I don’t keep up with the hardware very well between builds.
I don’t think this defeats the purpose, as I don’t expect a computer to last forever. I do reuse what few parts I can, such as power supplies, cases, fans, and hard drives.
True. I guess it’s not completely purposeless as I’ll reuse and repurpose what i can. But for last build especially I could barely reuse any of it. GPU, increasing power reqs overall and avoiding bottlenecking seem to muck up that strategy the most. If anything i enjoy what feels like a huge leap in performance every time i build one.
I think it’s always been like that, unless you upgrade a CPU for a 10% improvement.
I tended to do GPU as one upgrade, then the rest a few years later, treating the RAM, CPU and mobo as one unit.
But since prices of everything have been out of whack for ages now, I’m sticking with this 1060/i5-8400 box until something gives. If I want the latest whizzo graphics, I’ll play my PS5.
There used to be a sweet spot of early adopter where you could resell early enough and still make back 75% or more of the price. It’s just so prohibitive and unnecessary now to upgrade like that
From my own experience I would say that you’re probably not finding a chance to do intermediary upgrades because upfront you bought the top-range everything and maxed out things like memory and storage, and/or did not get a really good hobbyist motherboard (which is the part where you should really splurge).
I don’t get into the muggers’ game of top-range were you pay 2x-3x for just an extra 10% performance but instead get the stuff at the sweet-spot of price-performance, and then some years latter I can get stuff with what was before top-range performance at normal prices without a premium.
Similarly I don’t max out on things like memory and storage from the very start - I get what I need then and when I see that I need more I get more, by which point normally (not this shit going on right now) Moore’s Law means it’s way cheaper.
For example, the PC I’m using now for gaming recently got an improved CPU which wasn’t even out when I first bought this PC and which was near top range back then (as server CPU, even), which would’ve been $200 back then but was only $17 second hand some years later.
Of course, this way of doing things got totally fucked up with this PC parts bubble. Frankly the last PC upgrade I did was replacing Windows with Linux which in terms of how it feels was equivalent to a CPU and memory upgrade.
For one build I made that mistake. I went with SFF partly due to motherboard and RAM shortages and i could barely upgrade it… I won’t do that again. But before that i would start at low to mid spec for components, a mobo and PSU with room to grow, and slowly max them out over time.
However, like i said in another reply it seems like i can repurpose less and less in later builds as tech evolves more rapidly these days and or I run into a wall with bottlenecking something or another even if i can upgrade a component. As a result I’m definitely taking a longer pause this time.
Honestly, what game is coming out that’s a killer app that isn’t live service trash that they’ll cancel in a few months? I wish I still had my old consoles to play games on, some of them were real bangers even if I had beaten them. Space Marine 2 was my last top tier purchase and I only played it for a few weeks. Wasn’t a fan of their revision of the combat system.
Outside of that, none of the big studios are making ANYTHING worth the barriers to entry now. I don’t play at 4K, and I rather play New Vegas again for things I missed and different options.
I’m surprised that so many (40%) have plans to build a new PC in next two years. Especially because we are talking about PC Gamers, who are already PC Gamers. I would assume that most either do not, or upgrade instead build a new PC. From those 40% of 1.5k tomshardware readers who participated in the survey, I wonder in what state their PC are and if they HAVE to build a new PC or they just have a lot of money around and can afford it. Do they sell the old system or parts of it? Unfortunately these are unanswered at the moment.
In online communities at least, people seem to be keen to stay on the cutting edge and always have the best and shiniest. Toms Hardware is going to attract this very audience.
I accept that I’m probably too far the other way on the spectrum of patient gamers…but people don’t seem to think of the utility of the item and rather stay obsessed with “10% performance gains”. For the vast majority of people, phones, laptops and computers can easily last over 5 years (sometimes 10 years depending on use case).
Although these frequent upgraders do give a good stock of items for people like me to pick up and stay in the sweetspot of positioning behind the frontline of cutting edge products on the secondhand market.
I just wish I could get my friends into ‘patient gaming’ for multiplayer stuff, rather than that 10% performance gain for the latest and greatest ‘’‘’‘AAA’‘’'. The patient gamers communities here seem a little slow for finding people who want to play the same genre, and linking the lemmy account to any other account, like steam, gog, epic, etc., just doesn’t seem kosher.
I’ve abandoned any hope of playing multiplayer games, old or new, with people I know. No friends play indie/old games. Few people play games at all. I wish there were more asynchronous games to play. Turn taking at your leisure or progressing a shared game whenever you are able. It would be so cool if Don’t Starve Together could have a persistent server with a small group and everyone could dip in or out at any time to contribute to the farming and base building.
I’d love to play don’t starve together just because I am trash at don’t starve. I think I get about three nights in and… starve.
There are mods that let you make it into more of a farming/building game without worrying about dying.
Anecdotally but several of my friends build a new PC and then slide their old one to siblings who game but don’t need high end
It’s way easier to get rid of an entire computer second hand than it is bespoke parts that you’ve replaced, so this is what I do too. I used to be on a 4-year cadence with new PCs, but then I kept getting more and more mileage out of my machines, since graphics don’t leap forward so quickly like they used to. My current machine is 5 years old and still runs the latest games on high settings.
Heeeey, it’s me! Your sibling! You got any of that sweet sweet ddr5 ram??? Don’t hold out on me, boy!
I got my friends old box the same way. I’m into games that don’t require all that much. And will also use it to play minecraft with my kids.
Minecraft? MINECRAFT??? OH GOD NO!!! YOU WOULD NEED A $4,000 TOP OF THE LINE PC!!! 512GB RAM, 8 CORE, 16 THREAD AT 20GHZ EACH!!!
Gaming is too expensive. You should sell a kid.
Username checks out
Domated mine to the after school “day care”.
They helped me so much, I wanted to repay it in some capacityWell… I did upgrade mine progressively, I don’t think it still has any original parts, maybe some sata cables? I was able to get a smaller pc offspring out of this, ended up as my nephew’s gaming rig, does it count as my old rig? are both the same rig? damn computer of theseus causing philosophical problems!
that is the hand me down way, saves money to buy a new one. im not a heavy gamer but i do get hand me down from someone who games.
Yeah I found that strange too most of my gaming PCs have lasted me somewhere between 7 and 10 years. Would seem completely unnecessary for most people
I just upgrade one or two parts every 2-4 years. seems to have worked fine for over a decade. dreading when I need to do a mobo update which will include ram
I would imagine that 40% is saying that hoping for a best case scenario to occur. Prices haven’t even plateaued yet, they are still rising, so at some point regardless their enthusiasm they will be priced out of the market.
The thought that hardware prices will drop to normal levels in the next few years is just wishful thinking.
Gotta end the whole PISS trend first and have them not replace it with anything the way they replaced crypto mining with PISS
The question is kind of weird. I want to build a new gaming computer, but that is nothing I’m doing at current prices and I can totally live without building a new one. If that one breaks, I might reconsider. But I really do not know if there are people around who are planning to build a new computer in May 2028.
I recently built new to pass my current rig to my kid who is only interested in Roblox and other smaller games. And I mean the entire rig, including the desk.
I replaced my old PC only because I went from an i5 6600 to a ryzen 7800x3d and thus needed to replace the RAM as well.
Combone that with an old 4GB 960 and an older 2TB HDD and wanting another case the math was quite easy.It’s alao a quesrion how you interpret that? At what point is it a new PC vs upgrading? If you have replaced all parts from the original starting build?
Might explain the higher percentageI finally got round to a significant upgrade to my PC last week. I’ve been running the same PC for 10 years, and it’s really been dying. Fans and HDDs were failing, and it couldn’t play new games at all.
I haven’t replaced my GPU (still on a GTX 980ti) but I jumped to some decent DDR4 RAM, a better CPU, and moved into an SFF case, but I have no confidence any prices are set to stabilise, so I just gave in and built what I could.
I don’t believe in “just upgrading” at this point. If you built your PC with efficiency in mind, there’s like nothing you can even “upgrade”. Anything I can think of will get outdated by the time you need the next thing. A new GPU? Oh, you are still on Gen3… that means a new motherboard. Updating from AM4 to AM…4? Nah that feels like bad value, but AM5 requires DDR5, both of which have already been out for almost 5 years and will likely get replaced in a year or 2. Upgrading RAM? Again, just bumping DDR4 for a marginally better/larger cap DDR4 feels like bad value and unwarranted. Storage? Whoops, your old motherboard doesn’t support NVMe booting and it’s BIOS hasn’t been touched in over 5 years! You are lucky if you even have an M.2 slot.
And believe it or not, these prices are not even the worst they’ve ever been, so might as well just get a new PC every 5 or so years, maybe keep your old storage, CPU cooler, PSU and case, but that’s about it.
Don’t forget this market insanity started around COVID, and has basically been succeeded by consequent crises with few dips.
The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Adding in the GPU basically results in a new build, and that’s being generous assuming no upgrades/changes to other parts like PSU and storage.My take is that a lot of these people wishing to upgrade are those who have simply been holding out since 2020 or earlier. This seems to vaguely match up with the Steam Hardware results, with a fair number of people still using RTX 3000 series or RX 6000 series, of which even the top end cards are starting to become par/outperformed by their modern mid level counterparts.
The typical release cadence of PC components is around 4-6 years, which requires new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.
Not with AMD though. Usually the motherboard can be reused if you buy new generation of CPU and RAM (good luck if you have Intel, then you are screwed and need to change everything). But besides that, even after a few years upgrading graphics card and RAM is all you need to stay “competitive” to play top games. Maybe new SSD too. I don’t know how usual it is to upgrade parts along the way, not all at once. Especially in times like these just upgrading certain parts at a time is the only option for most.
I think you may overestimate how many people build their PCs instead of buying a prebuilt.
That’s not my estimation, that is the direct result of the survey.
A survey based on the audience of Toms Hardware …
It can be people budding into the genre. They’ve heard about how nice Steam is, and maybe play some games on a cheap laptop, but recognize a genuine desktop is the better experience.
One streamer I follow is in that situation. She streams off her PS5 and Switch, but has a donation incentive to help build her PC.
Not really, as the article is about PC Gamers who already have a PC. Otherwise they are not PC Gamers who want to build their next PC. I don’t think this survey is meant for newcomers, as far as I understand.
I might fall in that category, depending on how they’d ask me. I have a solid PC I built after crypto stopped inflating the prices but just before the RAM shortage and I’m mostly good, but I’ve got the money and have been thinking I could upgrade soon as a treat. Not at these prices though.
So it all depends if the situation improves in the next two years somewhat. This year? No chance, IMO. next year? Maybe. Maybe I’m too optimistic. But I definitely wouldn’t rule out be building a new PC in that timeframe.
i built a monster pc in 2024 and maxed out the RAM and CPU the motherboard could handle. New 4k monitor and a 32gb RTX video card. I think I spent about $1.5k
no way could I get that stuff for the same price. I could probably sell the parts for more
it’s still a monster and in Linux, I can tweak it just a bit more to get everything it can give.
I’m thinking that the way games have progressed in the last 5 years, there’s nothing on the horizon that says prepare for the new technology that will blow my mind
32g vram gpu for less than 2k is unlikely. A 4090 itself would be close to 2k
There… is only a single, mainline, broadly available RTX GPU with 32gb VRAM.
It’s the 5090 RTX.
Which came out in January of 2025.
At an MSRP of $2,000.
With many partner models considerably exceeding that, up to as high as $5,000.
Not only is the pricing ludicrous, the timing is not possible.
The only thing in 2024 or prior I can find with 32 gb vram is basically an unofficial mod or variant called the RTX 4090 D, that never left China, or, maybe it would be something like about as hard to find as a GRE variant AMD card in the US.
I guess unless this person’s uncle works at
NintendoNvidia, or something.Outside of that, we’re talking workstation/server type GPUs, generally with even more ludicrous pricing.
This person is either very confused or very bad at lying.
Also wtf does ‘maxed out the system ram’ even mean?
You can get 128gb of sys ram into… most middle to higher tier mobos with 4 dimm slots. Many higher tier pc mobos can do 256gb.
???
“Oh yeah I got the video card for free”
That’s honestly the only explanation for that build at just 1.5k. More likely they’re just a stinking liar 😅
With the specs they’ve claimed and that price, they either got much of it for free or are… yeah, straight-up lying. That price will get the case, mobo, CPU, RAM, PSU, and storage, probably. Maybe not even that much, if it’s all high-end stuff, before prices inflated. GPU and high-end monitor? Nah.
I can currently just barely figure out how to do a 9070 (non XT), 24gb DDR5, 1TB SSD via an AOOStar Gem 12 (soldered on 8745hs, iirc) total setup for the rig, at just a bit above $1500 before tax.
Without a monitor, of course.
That’s like the absolute most bang i can figure how to squeeze out of the least bucks, and its a non tradtional setup that works via a dock/cradle and Oculink (cost of that is included).
Doing the same specs in a traditional PC just ends up being more expensive, though its debatable as to whether the approximately 10% to 15% max performance hit on the GPU that OcuLink incurs in highly demanding scenarios makes that 100% true.
So yeah, this… this person is like, hilariously out of the realm of reality.
A high end monitor alone cost third the 2k budget. (Edit: edited, Edit 2: edited part 2)
For real, especially a few years ago. Now though, the 1440p/OLED/240hz version of my Acer Predator 27” is like 350 or less! Incredible deal.
The other 39% are optimistically hoping the bubble will pop within that 2 years and there will still be a market to buy from.
I have no such illusions - but a bit of me wonders if, possibly, this may drive the pc market back in the direction of its origins:
Devs were incentivised to write more efficient, leaner code because resources were expensive.
PC users focused on squeezing every. goddamn. drop. of performance out of their existing gear. Overclocking wasnt about making your 200 fps into 300 - it was about making that aging beast play something it had no right to even run.
I dont look forward to the coming days with any optimism… but maybe this whole scene needed a purging fire to foster new growth and diversity.
Or maybe we’ll just purge the source of these issues. Or both. Both would be nice. I can dream.
Don’t worry they’ll turn their datacenters into virtual PC hosting so that people who can’t afford to upgrade will have to rent the hardware…
Middleman all the things. It pains me to say that, in all likelihood, this period of time will be known for nothing but reinventing something that already exists - making a worse version of it - then enshitify.
What blows me away is while most people read dystopian stories and view them as cautionary tales… these rejects are using it as a framework.
“We finally succeeded in building the ‘Torment Nexus’, inspired by the book ‘Don’t create the Torment Nexus’.”
Dont forget how many of these twats name their companies after shit that literally screams “we are the baddies.”
Goodness who ever would have thought that “child crushers inc :)” would be crushing children?
That plus the ever growing push for device linked personal ID on personally owned device feels like the real end goal. Governments can already snoop all web traffic. Now they want to close the gap on device level surveillance by pushing more and more people towards renting virtual devices with traceable payment methods. For people who don’t, device link to personal ID means they no longer have any of that mess of having to prove ownership or who took the action.
Removing the tinfoil hat though, I really hope this causes cloud resource cost to drop through the floor.
It was always about control. No tin foil. Just reality. When you get to these levels of disproportionate power, greed, and corruption… you need to be able to quickly “stamp out” anything that even vauguely looks like a threat.
They dont want us to communicate. Obviously. Communication leads to revolution. No secrets. No encryption. No rights. Be a good drone and keep your head down. Smile for the cameras.
Thats ezactly what they want to do, bur when that happens we must resist it. Play old game. Use legacy hardware. Participation is tantamount to acceptance.
I’ll stick with factorio if that is the case.
Devs were incentivised to write more efficient, leaner code because resources were expensive.
AI are the devs now. And efficient code is probably the last thing they are known for doing.
Switching to Linux breathed new life into my current, newest machine, built in 2019. I lost track of time, and didn’t realize it had been that long, but it runs fine and does what I want it to do, so why blow money on a new machine?
I had exactly the same experience and I use the Linux machine for gaming.
Replacing Windows with Linux feels equivalent to a CPU and memory upgrade.
New is nice, but not at these prices, yeesh. I built my new rig just before the RAMpocalypse. And also the rig before that in 2020 just before the crypto had inflated the GPU prices too high. Call me lucky. Hopefully the prices go down in about five years. 😅
